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China news tagged with: tradition (11)

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Milk Scandal Engenders Moral Commentary

In response to the tainted milk scandal, several bloggers have questioned the moral foundation of Chinese society.

Inside-Out China’s author Xujun Eberlein has re-posted on an previous milk scandal comment:

The Chinese expression “quede” (缺德) , meaning “short of virtue,” used to be one of the most vicious insults in verbal arguments. Nowadays, the expression seems to have lost its admonishing power and has simply become a portrait of reality. Last year, a Chinese blogger cyber-named “David” attempted to analyze this. In his widely read article “Why have Chinese become ‘quede’ now?” he lists a few representative views on the Chinese moral sphere: all citizens worship money; no more baselines exist for minimal morality; today is the worst time of moral degeneration in China’s history; China should return to its traditional values.

Chris Devonshire-Ellis comments at China Brief on the moral valence of the recent tainted milk scandal, as well:

I find it hard to believe the Chinese executives at Sanlu, when faced with the request to recall their defective products deliberately set out to hospitalize or kill Chinese babies. Yet their actions, in not recalling product, and those also of the local government officials who failed to act, demonstrate a deep rooted inability to determine between right and wrong. They were amoral.

Earlier on in the article, Devonshire-Ellis accounts for this moral insufficiency in citing a lack of religious education:

[...]the deeper implication however is an essential lack of morality within Chinese society. With China being an atheist state, religion is strictly controlled. There is no religious education in Chinese schools, a situation completely at odds with most of the rest of the world. The impact of this has been to create a society largely amoral, ignorant of the differences between right and wrong.

Religious education notwithstanding, Eberlein also offers the contemporary Confucianist Jiang Qing’s take:

To [Jiang Qing] the essential problem is the lack of state ideology and a corresponding political system. Since the Cultural Revolution led to the self-destruction of Communism, that once ideological monopoly has lost its past aureole, and common Chinese have been unable to find the ultimate meaning and value for their individual lives.

“The problem isn’t that people don’t follow moral standards; the problem is that there no longer exist moral standards,” says Jiang Qing. He attributes the loss of morality to five decades of atrophy under Communist political power, plus two decades of corrosion under the money and wealth brought by the Western market economy.

See also CDT guest blogger Josie Liu’s recent post.
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- September 26, 2008 6:14 PM
Video: Throw Away Temple

The Xie Fangde Temple was built during the Ming Dynasty to commemorate Song Dynasty poet Xie Fangde. With plans to destroy the Temple looming, SexyBeijing.tv visits the site for one last look:

Just southwest of Tiananmen square the ancient Xie Fangde temple is nearing the end of its 600 year existence. Professor Zhang Bo gives us a tour of what’s left of the temple before it disappears forever, another casualty in Beijing’s ever-shrinking hutong neighborhoods.

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- April 8, 2008 4:51 PM
Qingming, Grave-sweeping Day

Although Qingming jie is an ancient Chinese holiday to commemorate the dead, it was only last December that the Chinese government made Qingming an official holiday. From China Daily:

People are walking to a cemetery in the west of Beijing on Friday, April 4, 2008. The Chinese traditional Qingming Festival falls on Friday this year, which is the occasion for Chinese people to pay respect to past ancestors by cleaning their graves, presenting offerings of food, and burning joss paper. [Xinhua]

Some 600,000 people visited graveyards in the suburbs of Chinese capital Beijing on Friday, about triple last year’s figure of 189,000, according to official statistics.
On December 16, the State Council (cabinet) revised the nation’s official holiday schedule to add three traditional festivals — Qingming, Duanwu and Zhongqiu — in response to public calls. It also changed the length of other holidays.

The holiday marked on Friday was Qingming, or grave-sweeping day.

The change was intended to allow more people to pay their respects to deceased relatives on what would otherwise be a workday like Friday. No national figures on this year’s tomb visits were immediately available.

A citizen mourns her relative in a cemetery in Guangzhou, capital of southern China’s Guangdong Province, April 4, 2008. The Chinese Qingming Festival, a day two weeks after the vernal equinox, is also called the Tomb-sweeping Day, when Chinese people usually mourn their deceased relatives, pay homage to martyrs and sweep the tombs of the departed. [Xinhua]

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- April 4, 2008 4:50 PM
China Discovers the Permissive Society

China’s youth are defying tradition with sexual promiscuity. But is education addressing this newfound freedom? And is age-old morality under seige? The New York Times reports on this new phenomenon and its consequences:

Every weekend, lusty college couples make a beeline past greasy spoon restaurants and bootleg video game shops for the dim hotel lobbies to book three-hour blocks of privacy. Students fill half the simple but tidy rooms at the Cheng Lin Ming Guang Hotel, a 10-minute walk from Beijing Normal University.

China is in the midst of a sexual revolution, a byproduct of rising prosperity and looser government restrictions on private life. The relaxed attitudes about sex mark a historic turnaround from the days when love and sex were denounced as bourgeois decadence, and unisex Mao suits and drab austerity were the norm.
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- March 4, 2008 1:20 AM
In China, a Moon Cake Makeover – Maureen Fan

The Washington Post:

Workers strung red lanterns and spruced up parks across the city for Tuesday night’s celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which for centuries has marked the end of harvest and the time in the lunar calendar when the moon is at its brightest.

It is a time for family reunions, for moon-gazing and especially for moon cakes, the round pastries traditionally filled with red bean or lotus seed paste and often containing an egg yolk to represent the moon….[Full Text]

[Image: Visitors pass by massive moon lanterns at Beijing's Lugou Bridge, which was decorated last week in preparation for the Mid-Autumn Festival, via WP]
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- September 25, 2007 8:39 PM
Savvy Mooncake Sellers Make Big Use of the Internet – Xinhua

From Xinhua via Shanghai Daily:

In the run-up to Mid-Autumn Festival, today, the war for mooncake sales is heating up in stores and restaurants. Meanwhile, a discount mooncake market is booming on the Internet, with the number of related posts hitting 551 on a Beijing sub-BBS alone.

One advertiser surnamed Wu said, “Mid-Autumn Festival is synonymous with mooncakes, which symbolizes the really close relationships between customers, colleagues, friends and family. “Mooncakes are more a symbol of the Mid-Autumn Festival than something to eat. A few bites are enough to taste the tradition.” [Full Text]

[Image of H√§agen-Dazs mooncakes via Shanghaiist]
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- September 24, 2007 2:02 PM
Dead Bachelors in Remote China Still Find Wives – Jim Yardley

From the New York Times:

For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple…

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants ” or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one. [Full text]
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- October 4, 2006 8:09 PM
Family tree of Chinese sage branches out to include women – Jonathan Watts

From the Guardian, another article about the rejuvenation of Confucius’ legacy in China:

It has taken almost 2,557 years, but the family tree of Confucius, the philosophical father of Asia’s male dominated society, is finally going to acknowledge women. Female descendants will be recognised in a new lineage chart of the Chinese sage’s family – forecast to grow to more than three million people by the time the survey is complete in 2007.

The change, announced ahead of today’s birthday celebrations in Confucius’s hometown of Qufu, reflects a growing move to reinterpret and apply the ancient teachings, as the world’s most populous nation moves further and further away from Marxism. [Full text]
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- September 27, 2006 8:34 PM
Ancient classics redeemed in modern-day China – Xu Xiaomin

From Shanghai-Star:

For dozens of years, many Chinese people, especially the young, have been proud of speaking good English and being familiar with foreign culture. Such people are considered knowledgeable.Suddenly, the situation has changed.

Just one or two years ago, a long forgotten word guoxue (State study, which mainly means the Chinese ancient classics) has become a source of pride that is sweeping China: Guoxue classes have opened around the country, young people have organized clubs to wear Han clothes with long gowns and big sleeves, even the Chinese lover’s day was hyped by both the media and shops.

Chinese people are eager to study traditional culture now. [Full Text]
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- September 3, 2006 8:57 AM
China Daily: Xinjiang’s music may join world list

From China Daily, via People’s Daily:

Uygur Mukam, the melodious centuries-old music from Xinjiang, might soon become an art form deemed to be internationally-recognized intangible cultural heritage.

The genre dates back to the 15th century and comprises narrative and dance music created by the ancient Uygur people.

Intangible cultural heritage is defined by the UNESCO as “the practices, representations, expressions, as well as the knowledge and skills, that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.”

State-level heritage means that the subject has high art value which faces the threat of extinction; and would be placed under a well-designed protection plan.
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- April 26, 2005 10:26 PM
Xinhua: The unbearable heaviness of tradition

From Xinhua – English:

As many other celebrations like the Double Seventh Festival and Dragon Boat Festival have gradually faded from public attention, Spring Festival, or Chinese Lunar New Year, seems to be the last tradition still cherished today, although a lot of its cultural content has been lost or changed.

According to 56-year-old Cao Baoming, vice chairman of the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society, in ancient China, based on the Sun’s apparent movement on the ecliptic, people divided the solar year into 24 seasonal division points. The traditional calendar starts the solar year with the Beginning of Spring (marking the Sun’s position at 315?) to suit seasonal changes in the North China Plain and the Lower Yangtze Basin.
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- February 28, 2005 8:12 AM